Events

Prof. Tony Kong
Professor of Organizational Leadership and Information Analytics
Leeds School of Business
University of Colorado Boulder

Having a follower’s trust is critical for leadership effective, yet leaders can experience a felt trust deficit — the feeling that they are not fully trusted by a follower — in a leader-follower relationship. Drawing on social self preservation theory and emotional appraisal theory, we propose that when a leader perceives a felt trust deficit from a follower, they view it as a threat to their social self as it suggests that the follower questions them as a leader. This appraisal evokes social-evaluative shame, which in turn leads to abusive supervision toward the follower as a defensive response to protect the self. Moreover, the indirect relationship is amplified when a leader perceives status threat from their colleagues, which reflects a broader sense of social devaluation. Findings from four studies — a multi-source field survey, a scenario-based experiment, a recall-based quasi-experiment, and a multi-wave field survey — support our model. Together, our research highlights the role of felt trust in influencing leaders’ emotions and behaviors and underscores its implications for leader-follower relationships.